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What type of work do you do? Webdev, sysadmin or ? It seems remote working is only just becoming mainstream acceptable. How were you able to start doing so 17 years ago? Has it been with the same company or many companies? Are you independent consultant? Sorry for so many questions, I just haven't been able to figure out how to work remotely full-time. The best I've gotten was 1-2 days a week. Appreciate your reply.

I know someone who has worked over 20 remote years coding AS/400 for large corporations (last one I knew of was Whirlpool). Think she started on dialup. So it has been around for a while, but clearly has gotten more popular over time.

Here is how to find a remote job.. find a remote FIRST company. Not a normal company you ask if you can work remote. Find a company that only hires remote people. Watching the companies that post on say weworkremotely.com and you will find something interesting.

That said, remote jobs do tend to have more competition. Since anyone can apply to any remote job, I suspect they get 20x the resumes of a local job (would love to hear for someone who has worked both sides of HR to confirm). So you can't just apply to 2 jobs and assume you will get 1 of them. It will take more work.

I've gotten multiple jobs via weworkremotely.com - and hired from there.

Our ad for a sysadmin got 100+ resumes, of which about 50 were trashable, and we had a dozen plus excellent candidates.

How does 100 compare to your average local ad posting? Seems high but not as high as I had expected.

50% trashable from a web posting is amazingly good.

Maybe he had a low trash threshold ;)

It may have been higher. But it seems that weworkremotely seems to have a good bar for candidates. Also: I'm counting candidates, not agencies and such spamming.

> find a remote FIRST company. Not a normal company you ask if you can work remote.

+1 for this. I worked remotely for a while for a company who I convinced it would be a good idea. It didn't work out well because I was the only remote employee and their culture and processes just weren't set up for it. I spent more time reminding people to dial me into meetings and convincing my bosses that I was actually working than doing my real job. If the company isn't already bought into having remote workers, being the pioneer is painful.

I'm not the GP, but I've been working remotely for 5 years as a software dev. About 1/3 of the devs in our org are remote.

Does that work out for you? I have not enjoyed being on the remote Minority of a project. Very easy to miss watercooler convos and totally be off tangent. People need to be very slack-first for the remote people to stay looped in.

Remote works best when the entire company is remote. It needs to be embedded in the culture IMO. Or else the remote workers often become isolated from the rest of the company.

It works well for us and is very much a part of our culture. Of the people who work out of the office, I'd guess that only half go in on any given day. Basically all conversations happen in our chat client and all meetings are in Google Hangouts. Email or Google Docs are used for things that need to persist or be searchable in the future. We do insist that, in general, you work more or less in a US timezone so you're available for "face-to-face" meetings and standups. That hasn't been a problem for anyone yet.

My path:

* Find a company that already relies on digital communication. Maybe they have a couple different offices, and employees communicate heavily over Slack. A company is unlikely to make this kind of change just for you, and I find it critical to working remotely with a team.

* Work for a number of years at a company and do a good job. Become a person they want to retain.

* Be an excellent communicator. Don't be the guy/gal who's hard to get ahold of because you're never logged into Slack, or because you check your email only once a day, or because you never answer your phone.

* Be upstanding, honest, and forthright. Be self-supervising. Be the person your manager doesn't have to think about, while still knowing you'll do an awesome job. Give them nothing to fear regarding whether you'll continue to do a great job without supervision.

* Be slightly underpaid for your market.

That last one probably isn't something to seek out, necessarily. But it's a good bit of leverage to use when trying to convince your manager that you should be allowed to work remotely. If you can convince them that letting you work remotely is free for them but a perk for you that's likely to keep you at the company, you've won.

I would much rather be a little underpaid and be able to work from home! Not having to suffer through traffic is worth at last 10k per year. Only downside is not being around people as much. Kind of a two edged sword. But it makes me very friendly at the grocery store and coffee shop. Been working from home since the 96 olympics. Hardest thing has been convincing my wife that when I am sitting at my desk and in the zone, that she should ask me a question every time she things of something new....

This is exactly what I saw at my previous company 5-6 years ago. They had no remote work policy but made exceptions for a few key people.

Those few were very good at what they did for years consistently and well liked (responsible, pleasant, mature).

I consider whatever extra steps required (being nearly always available on IM, etc) for remote work is well worth it, because remote work offers so much benefits.

'sysadmin'

I used to think server/sysadmin was one job where you had to be there and that remote job was only for devs. But now with AWS and cloud computing, sysadmin for remote working is just as easy. Amazing how things change.

This has always been the case for any competent sysadmin. I know of zero senior sysadmins that have worked on-premise on a regular basis over the past 20 years. You leave that for the remote hands guys who rack and stack stuff, not your senior level guys who's hours are much better spent doing harder things.

We used to do this via remote serial console 20+ years ago, then we moved to IPKVM, and now ipvkm over integrated IPMI controllers.

I've managed groups of sysadmins over the years, and the truly talented will outright refuse non-remote work. Since they can demand it.

All my previous employers required sysadmin onsite mainly because they didn't want to invest in the necessary infrastructure, like KVM with ethernet connectivity or networked powerstrips.

Maybe I just haven't been blessed with working with crack team of sysadmins or a shop big enough to justify such investment.

Oh, and I used to work with Windows servers...

> I've managed groups of sysadmins over the years, and the truly talented will outright refuse non-remote work. Since they can demand it.

Sysadmin/Devops here. To confirm your point, I don't take any work that isn't fully remote, and I don't take any position for less than $100k/year USD (~15 years experience).

Scott Hanselman hacked a light outside his home office to indicate his Lync (now Skype for Business) status.

I always though this was a novel way of indicating to the kids whether he could be disturbed when doing remote working.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IsDaddyOnACallABusyLightPresen...

Couldn't he just use a door to indicate the same status? Door open = okay to come in. Door shut = no interruptions.

He seems eager to create additional work for himself to come up with a solution when there isn't really a problem. I wonder what else in life he is going to come up with an elaborate solution for (introducing many new potential points of failure) when the obvious solution has been in front of him the whole time. Would you really want to work with a guy like that? Would you want to pay him to solve problems for you?

I might not want to work with someone who didn't realize there is more than one purpose for a door, and that a single bit of information sometimes doesn't cut it.

Lync status updates automatically, whereas getting up to open and close a door takes work every time. Plus, it's just a fun little project. Lighten up.

>Leave your work laptop at your desk. Get a second laptop, tablet, etc that doesn't have work stuff on it if you're going to use electronic stuff around the family outside work hours.

Even if you don't work from home, keep work devices and personal devices separate. The closest I'll mix the two is logging into a public facing email portal if one is available. Want me to have official stuff on my smart phone? Then I need to be provided with one. Want me to take work home with me? Then I need a laptop.

I do not mix company and personal devices to reduce liability to myself and reduce risk to the company (I do my best to avoid getting viruses, but it would be hubris to think I'm immune to such).

As a dad to a young family (2 kids under 3.5 and another due in two months) working remote (in our case all four of us that started our current company live in different cities) has been awesome. I just hit a year last week, I did it for two year about seven years ago as well (but I travelled 50%).

The key for me has been that I actually have a Regus office I go to, not just a space in the house- mostly because my kids are too young to get that dad's working.

My office is a 10 minute bike ride or 3 by car so I come home for lunch, take the kids to mid-day mid-week swim lessons, and basically have no problems with making appointments anymore. I run home frequently if the wife has an appointment, or sometimes just to clear my head and hang out.

I never bring my laptop home and I'm home before its dark now. Usually by 16:30, if I need to have a long day I'm in the office by 04:30 or 05:00. I go to bed a little early the night before and I add the hours to the beginning of my day and make sure I get home before dinner.

Most mornings I get to see the boys, help get them ready, make breakfast and hang out for a bit before I'm in the office. I also get to the gym at least 4 days a week and have lost 30 pounds in the last year while probably ACTUALLY working more hours per week.

I don't think I could ever go back to working like how I used to. I would leave the house at 05:30 to commute downtown. Get to the office by 6:15ish, and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to get out of the office before 17:00- meaning I got home between 18:00 and 19:00 depending on awful Seattle traffic.

I loved the people I worked with at my last company and I do miss seeing them every day, we still get lunches occasionally (I have to go to them, naturally) but I could never go back to a 'normal' office routine.

+1 to Regus for being a digital nomad or traveling.

They are available worldwide, with typically many locations in major metropolitan areas. The Internet is reliably good. Even small things like internationally-compatible AC wall plugs are a nice touch.

I can't say what it's like to rent a real office there, but for a backup for hotel Internet or just a place to get a change of scenery while away from home, they're great. I have the business world gold card, and it's not too expensive, especially compared to a coworking space located in just one city.

Coworking spaces local to a city are nice, but can vary wildly in cost, and sometimes require convincing the team to let you work there on short notice (walk-ins aren't particularly welcome, unless you carefully explain you have experience at coworking places).

One other nice thing about the Regus locations I've been to in big cities: there's usually some really nice views out their windows. This has been true in Boston, Auckland, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Tokyo - it's surprisingly inspiring!

Edit: and gosh do I realize this reads like I'm a shill for them. I'm not. It just seems like $60 per month - the cost of Internet in the USA - to get an office in any major city in the world is a good deal. But that's because I'm traveling a lot right now, too, so YMMV.

My first experience with them was in London about 8 or 9 years ago. That employer was starting up a London office and wanted a nice Trafalgar Square address. It made it incredibly easy to get 7 or 8 people together and have conference rooms, etc. and it was also a lot cheaper than immediately building out an office space.

My current setup is just south of downtown Seattle. At first $850/mo for about 120 square feet with a window seems expensive until you look into the other options. Building out a space for 1 person is crazy, a 'less nice' space isn't good for having visitors and all require you to obtain your own telco and Internet. None of the other places had shared spaces and bookable conference rooms. Lastly, having the receptionists is REALLY helpful, at minimum if you have packages you don't want sitting on your doorstep.

There's also something to be said about walking in to an office every day that's just _nice_. Even older spaces that haven't been renovated yet are still classy (and not in a Donald Trump way) and nice. The brand new ones like mine are significantly better than a lot of corporate HQs I've been to.

I'm moving to Portland in a few months and the first thing I did was pull up the Regus office map and start calling- my experience has been fantastic.

It's true that a lot of people working remote need a quite place to work, but there's a lot that don't.

Your comment about having a second sets of personal devices for personal use reminded me of how given given I do all of my owned IT support that doing backups and having the data encrypted is really important if you're using device in public; lucky I've never had an issue, but I've know people that had a device stolen, stranger spill coffee on it, etc.; worth noting that a backup is worthless if you can't recover it.

I am sure that having a family will change everything about how I work and I hope it will make even more sense.

Thanks for advice!

How old are your kids? I've got a 3 and a 0 year old at home (with a nanny) and even on a separate floor, the chaos is making me want a regular office job again after 5 years working from home.

This is why god created day care. Also a good pair of headphones work.

Some people, my wife being one of them, don't trust others to raise their children at this age.

We don't do day care because we don't want to get subjected to the absolute onslaught of pestilence and plague that is toddler day care.

Another very valid reason to avoid putting your children in daycare. Sick infants and toddlers make for very lousy sleep.

I worked from home with a 3-4 year old and a 0-1 year old for a year (they're in daycare now) and it wasn't a problem for me because I set clear ground rules that no one was allowed to bug me in the office unless it was an emergency.

I'd just close the door to my office put my headphones on (either with or without music) and get to work. Having the kids there was never an issue for me and it was nice being able to eat lunch with the kids some days.

As someone with small kids (slightly older), I can totally relate why it can seem so hard to work from home. Yeah, having such young kids at home will mean chaos, even with mom/nanny. My kids are slightly older and can entertain themselves for extended time but still I need to step away from desk to referee some arguments etc. But still well worth it.

Don't give up on working from home. Look up coworking space near your home. Or ask around to borrow a cubicle or a desk from a firm nearby.

I have 3 and 0 year kid and sometime it's crazy. Especially when I have telco and younger one is screaming because is hungry. But we have huge house so I those cases I am moving to other end.

I am trying to help my wife as I can but work needs to be done first, unless goes for life.

I tust turned a year working remotely and have a 3.5 year old and an 18 month old. I knew from the get go it would be impossible to work from home and rented an office space as close as possible to home. Less than a 5 minute drive, or a beautiful 10-15 minute bike ride along a river.

I get to be home throughout the day as much as I want to be, I can be home in a moment's notice. But more importantly I can concentrate or take a phone call without the crashes, cries, and screams. I couldn't get ANYTHING done from home if I tried. Maybe when they're older/in school. Until then it's $800/mo well spent.

I wouldn't trade my current situation for an office job, it's the best setup I've ever had and the whole family is a lot happier since I switched to this- but it would be a different ballgame if I was home like you. I couldn't do it, I'd go crazy.